The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (41 page)

“Huh. And what do you think makes the best cooks? What skill, what quality?”

Most of my apprentices just mumbled something about knowing all the recipes by heart. Bartolomeo hesitated, then raked a hand through his hair and laughed. “I have no idea,” he said. “I don’t
know
enough yet to know.”

I glowered, pleased. “Well, Bartolomeo, there’s one thing that separates a great cook from a good one.” Actually, there was far more than one, but apprentices could only handle information in small doses. “Above all else, you must know the natures of those you cook for: their histories, their tastes, their moods. It is not enough to serve just the same recipes from the book, the ones you’ve learned by rote one after the other. You serve them the food they don’t even know they’re craving.”

He nodded. “Like the night when Lord Sforza came to dine, and you served sea bass in truffles and roe and everybody started making love.” He grinned. “I kissed my first girl that night. Maria the laundry maid, in the stable yard.”

I had a memory of steel-strong hands holding me utterly immobile as a cool mouth moved over me, and brushed it aside. “Immaterial. Just tell me—” I turned back to the bucket, stirring the smelt with my fingertips. “How would you prepare lake smelt like these?”

“Fried,” he said promptly. “They’re best when fried in butter.”

“But how would you make lake smelt for Madonna Giulia?” I asked. “You’ve lived in her household for a year now; you know something of her tastes. What will appeal to her most?”

He hesitated, absently fingering the little wooden cruifix that always hung about his neck. He reached into the bucket, feeling the quality of the fish, leaning down for a sniff. “Still fried,” he said slowly. “Because fried food makes people feel better—and Madonna Giulia is feeling sad lately, her maid says. Because the Holy Father’s eye is wandering—”

“We don’t need to know why she feels sad,” I rapped out. “
That
would be prying, and a good cook never pries. So, fried smelt?”

“With a different sauce, though. You like sauces with a drizzle of orange,
signorina
, but that’s too tangy for this.” He frowned. “A green sauce. Parsley, burnet, sorrel, spinach tips, rocket—a little mint, maybe. Ground fine with almonds—”

“What kind of almonds?” I interrupted.

“Milanese almonds, they’re the best.”

“Why?” I challenged.

“They just are.” His voice was absent, and I smothered a smile. “The green sauce, it should go over top; very simple, very fresh. It will remind Madonna Giulia of the country, when she was a girl—you said she grew up by Lake Bolsena? She’ll think of being a girl again. It will make her . . .” he shrugged. “Happy.”

“Then perhaps you’d care to prepare the dish for her tonight.” I turned away from his stunned expression to rattle off my order to the fishmonger. He grunted assent and began scooping fresh smelt from the bucket for me. “I’ll supervise, mind,” I threatened, turning back to my apprentice. “One sign that you’re mucking it up, and I take over. Understand?”

“Yes,
signorina
.” He stood there clutching the basket, fighting off the grin that threatened to take over his entire face. He had a right to grin—he was a full year younger than any other apprentice I’d ever asked to prepare a dish for the high table. He was also, unless I was very much mistaken, the only one among them with the prospect for being a really
good
cook someday.

“A fish menu tonight, I think,” I continued, allowing Bartolomeo to fall into step beside me as we proceeded to the next vendor. “And a good array of the local fruits.” I was already pulling various dishes together. No Roman
pizze
, as I’d originally thought; that would just make Madonna Lucrezia homesick. She had to learn her new home, after all, and what better way than to give her that knowledge through food? A cold salad of spring onions and the local cucumbers; sturgeon from Pesaro’s salt sea and trout from its freshwater river; grapes and peaches from its orchards and white melons from its vines; finished off with pastry diamonds stuffed with the ripe local apricots. A refreshing summer
cena
of all Pesaro had to offer, eaten in the
palazzo
garden and washed by the smell of the sea.

“No smelt for Madonna Adriana,” I mused, pausing by a load of salted tench. “She thinks it’s too expensive . . .”

“Lake trout,” Bartolomeo said promptly. “She’s an old trout herself; she’ll love it.”

I gave his shoulder a whack, suppressing a smile. “Never speak ill of an employer!”

“Well, trout’s cheaper than smelt, and that will please her.” He shifted the heaping basket to his other arm, undaunted. “If you don’t mind,
signorina
—I heard a recipe from a cook to the German ambassador when he called on Madonna Giulia to ask favors of His Holiness. Trout simmered in a sort of sweet-and-bitter sauce with white wine and vinegar and a little butter, served over slices of toast . . . it’s just the sort of cozy food Madonna Adriana likes.”

“Never trust a German to get a sauce right,” I sniffed. “Their solution to everything is just add more butter. Perhaps with a little pepper and cinnamon, though . . .”

Leonello

T
he little Countess of Pesaro rustled into place, arranging her arms carefully before her, tilting her head at just the right angle. “
Now
you may look!”

I had never bothered to close my eyes, but the rest of the company removed hands from faces and burst into applause. The Pope’s daughter stood in a white gown painted all over with flowers upon the silk; her hair spilled loose down her back, a wreath of roses crowned her head, and she held more roses caught up in a fold of her skirt. She held her pose, lips parted, paused in the act of stepping forward. I had the feeling she was wishing for a breeze to rustle her hair upon command.

“Primavera!” Lord Sforza shouted. “From that painting, the fellow in Florence, or was it Mantua? You know the fellow I mean . . .”

“Botticelli,” I murmured.

“Maestro Botticelli,” the Count of Pesaro continued, not acknowledging me. “That’s my dove, you’re Botticelli’s Primavera!”

“My lord husband is quite correct.” Lucrezia broke her pose, curtsying prettily, and the company applauded again. Not a very lively company—Lord Sforza and several of his stolid-faced captains, Lucrezia and Madonna Adriana and their various favorite attendants, Giulia la Bella with her little pet goat in her lap—but a certain fair-haired Caterina Gonzaga and her husband, Count Ottaviano da Montevegio, had newly arrived on their northbound journey from Rome back to their estates in San Lorenzo, and that lent the evening’s usual peaceful post-
cena
proceedings a certain edge.

“Caterina Gonzaga is a great beauty,” Giulia explained to Lucrezia’s new circle of ladies, who had been assembled for a council of war the instant the Countess’s arrival was anticipated. “And what’s more, she’s a
very
ambitious one. Stalks about as though she’s the queen of heaven,
and
she made eyes at His Holiness all through Joffre’s wedding. With the cold I had then, I was hardly able to smack her down like the tart she is. I shall ransack Florence for brocade if necessary, but I will
not
be outshone this time.”

I stood in the background in my perennial black and observed a great deal of kissing and cooing when all the ladies greeted Caterina Gonzaga. The degree to which women kiss and coo, I’ve found, is in direct proportion to the degree to which they dislike each other. Giulia and Lucrezia compared new rings and bracelets with the Countess before evening
cena
, gushed over new gowns as they settled to eat, and afterward rustled into the ill-painted and provincial little
sala
in a pretty trinity that did not turn its backs on each other for a moment. Lord Sforza and Caterina Gonzaga’s paunchy Count and the other men sat in the candlelight talking grimly of the French campaign, the army that had just crossed south from France to Savoy, while the ladies made light conversation and planned campaigns of a different kind.

“Oh, the French,” Lucrezia had finally exclaimed when the discussion turned ponderously to the matter of which cardinals had been suborned to the enemy’s side. “Until the French actually land on my doorstep, I refuse to hear another word about them. I propose a game, instead—”

Each lady would present herself before the company as some famous work of art and be judged by the men to see who was fairest. “I haven’t had time to prepare,” Caterina Gonzaga said with a regal toss of her head, but that was brushed aside.

“
I
have,” Lucrezia said smugly, dimpling at her husband again.

“Well,
that
isn’t fair,” the Countess said, outraged as any wronged queen, but Giulia came to Lucrezia’s defense.

“We’ll improvise! Isn’t that half the fun?”

“Is a beauty contest between women ever a good idea?” I interjected into the commotion. “Doesn’t anyone remember how the Trojan War began?”

“We’re not going to war with the Trojans now too, are we?” one of Lord Sforza’s loutish country captains wondered. “Trojans—are they from France?”

Dio.
But my groan was lost in the rustle and bustle as the ladies prepared themselves. Lucrezia as hostess had presented her little tableau first, and the little Primavera now sat with a great satisfied rustle of her white skirts. Lord Sforza captured her hand in his rough one and brought it to his lips, still besotted, and she smiled back at him with her other hand grazing her belly. Botticelli’s Primavera had been painted with a swelling belly beneath her flowery silks—I wondered if the Pope’s daughter could possibly be breeding yet.
Quick work, my lord Sforza.
Though the Pope would be livid: Sforza had not acquitted himself well in his father-in-law’s eyes of late. When
not
in bed with his new wife, the Count of Pesaro spent all his time vacillating between committing his soldiers with those of his French-allied family in Milan—or to the papal forces in Rome. Last I had heard, the Pope had got thoroughly tired of all the waffling and ordered him to do as he damned well pleased. Yes, the bloom had definitely gone from the Sforza alliance as far as His Holiness was concerned.

“My turn,” Caterina Gonzaga said, rising proud as an empress. Whispers and giggles as her maids escorted her behind a screen to change her dress, and the men were furtively talking about the French again and Giulia fingering the great pearl at her throat as God knew what thoughts stole the smile from her face, and then we were bidden to close our eyes.

“Now!” the Countess’s voice commanded. “Look at me now!”

I wondered if she had those words embroidered on all her sigils as a personal motto. I didn’t care for our guest. Before
cena
she’d asked over my head if the dwarf juggled or tumbled, and then she’d spent the meal itself tossing me scraps from her plate as though I were a dog. Giulia had spent the meal requesting that she please desist, sweetness of tone decreasing markedly with each request.

Still, there could be no denying Caterina Gonzaga was a beauty. A very pale beauty: a great deal of white-blond hair and even whiter skin; pale gray eyes that gleamed like silver—and that, of course, was why she could be ill-tempered, capricious, and spiteful. Beauty excuses everything. Easy to forget that when living beside Giulia Farnese, who was certainly a beauty but who lost her temper at no one, offended nobody, made no demands, threw no tantrums. Far less regal than Caterina Gonzaga, but far easier to live with.

Count Ottaviano da Montevegio was already snoring at the back of the
sala
as his wife came out and struck her pose, and the audience burst into applause. More desultory applause this time, as the women clapped only the bare minimum they could get away with, and the men were too busy gawping to put their hands together. The Countess had not
quite
appeared before us naked, but she had stripped to the filmiest of shifts and loosened her pale hair to stream to her hips. One hand she held modestly across her breasts; the other brought a hank of her own hair around to cover the joining of her thighs, and she gazed out over our heads with all the splendid serenity of a goddess.

Madonna Adriana clicked her tongue in disapproval. The men shared lascivious grins, and Lucrezia jabbed an elbow into her husband’s ribs. No one seemed inclined to make a guess, but the Countess did not seem to mind anyone taking their time.

“The Birth of Venus,” I said at last into the small silence. “Also Botticelli. Though you are lacking a seashell to stand upon, Madonna Caterina, and you should have taken off that ruby on your hand. Venus came from the sea without the benefit of jewels.”

“Oh, this?” the false Venus said artlessly, breaking her pose to display her hand (and as much as she could of her bosom), letting the ruby sparkle in the candlelight. “I couldn’t bear to take it off, that’s all. I treasure it—a present from His Holiness, you know. He was a
very
generous host when my husband and I were last in Rome.”

Her eyes went to Madonna Giulia, alight with triumph, and I saw Lucrezia and Madonna Adriana give quick looks as well. My mistress never blinked; just lifted a hand from the pet goat sleeping in her lap and idly fingered the huge teardrop pearl about her neck. “I’ve never cared for rubies,” she murmured. “So easy to fake these days, with all those clever glass copies coming in from Venice. Why, I’ve heard one can fake a good ruby for a handful of ducats, and no woman would be any the wiser! Pearls, now, those are far harder to palm off on the ignorant . . . Goodness, is it my turn already?”

That shut the Gonzaga bitch up, and she flounced off behind the screens to change back into her dress—making plans, I was sure, to present her ruby to the nearest jeweler for inspection. I thought I saw Giulia blink rather hard as she shifted the goat from her lap to rise, and wondered if she was fighting back tears. Letters from His Holiness, I knew, had been rather few.

“I’m afraid the best of Maestro Botticelli’s work is taken already,” she said. “A pity he doesn’t seem to be painting anymore—I heard there was a mad monk preaching simplicity in Florence, and now half the artists in the city are renouncing paint as secular frivolity—”